Can’t NRC be error free?
STAFF REPORTER
GUWAHATI: In a shocking revelation, names of foreigners, doubtful voters, and of people whose cases are pending in the Foreigners Tribunal and their descendants have been included in the complete draft NRC (National Register of Citizens) published on July 30.
According to reports, 200 such names of 39 families from Morigaon District alone have made their way into the draft NRC. This discrepancy came to the notice of Morigaon district administration only after the publication of the final draft NRC.
The district administration has already brought it to the notice of NRC State Coordinator Prateek Hajela. Notably, the similar inclusion of names of people whose citizenship was under the scanner had been included in the first part draft NRC published at the expiry of midnight 2017. Those names, of course, were subsequently deleted from the draft document.
Talking to The Sentinel, Morigaon Deputy Commissioner Hemen Das said: “According to rules, such names should not be included in the final draft NRC. We are looking into the matter to ascertain as to how the names got included in the final draft NRC. We have already informed the State Coordinator of NRC about the matter.”
Meanwhile, State Coordinator of NRC Prateek Hajela when contacted said: “Updating of the NRC is a continuous process until the final NRC is published.
Even if any such inclusion of names has taken place, there are means to sieve them out and have them finally deleted from the final NRC.”
It may be mentioned that after the publication of the first draft NRC, the Gauhati High Court had directed the NRC authority, border police, Home, and Political Department, as well as the Election Departmentto maintain a central data pool of all names included in the citizens’ register. However, against the backdrop of discrepancies in the compilation of the final draft NRC, it remains to be seen as to how error-free the complete draft NRC would be.